"Confession of Light and Shadow" Everyone has a "unhemped house"

Citizens watch movies in a movie house. (Xinhua News Agency reporter Xiong Qi/photo)

The delay of the epidemic has almost paralyzed the film industry, but it has benefited some fans of old films - because of the lack of new films, many old classics have been re-released in restored versions. Imatoshi's famous work "The House of unma" (Hong Kong and Taiwan translation: Blue Fear) is also listed, this brain-burning masterpiece of 1997, today seems to have a different taste, the reflection on idol culture is certainly the focus, but the existence and division of "virtual personality", after more than 20 years of technological changes to gain a more complex look.

In fact, the audience who watches/spies on this movie today, everyone has a "unhemped house". What do you mean by that? The name "Unma's House" comes from the name of the fan page of the idol singer Unma in the movie, this fan page writes a diary in the virtual tone of Unma, and its detail and depth surprised The unma himself who browsed the web was also surprised. The horror is that when Wei Ma chose to transform from an idol singer to an actor, the virtual diary began to resist reality to create a Wei Ma who still existed in the idol singer period and could not extricate himself. This image and the creator behind it directly control a crazy fan Me-Mania through the virtual "voice" to eliminate the screenwriters, photographers, and even the unma himself who intends to eradicate reality.

The later truth is known to everyone, although there are different understandings of the schizophrenia of The Unma himself, but the readers of the film at least agree that the founder of the "Unma's Budya" is her grown-up agent who is unwilling to face the idol singer: Rumi. From today's eyes, Liu Mei is not only a deep schizophrenic (she thinks of herself as an idol singer Behind her back), she is also a symbol of connecting two eras of entertainment - she herself was an idol singer, coming from the idol bubble of the 1980s, and she learned Internet knowledge earlier than the young Wei Ma, creating fan pages to achieve the purpose of replacing reality with virtual, which leads to the future.

It is estimated that even Imatoshi himself did not expect that fan pages and personal virtual social accounts are already "ministry houses" that everyone can have today - a small paradise that they completely dominate. Just as Liumei arranged her room as an unhemped room, we can all run the "self" on the Internet, a perfect and schizophrenic self, to create an image that you are willing to present to the vast number of unfamiliar viewers.

Have you ever tried to "live simultaneously" on WeChat, Weibo, Facebook, and IG while conceiving a beautiful photo and a paragraph of tone text when you are in real life? And this "synchronous life" is destined to be a parallel universe, and there must be deviations and beautifications of reality. At this time, you have become a Liu Mei who intends to kill Wei Ma - and your excuse is the same as Liu Mei, you are all judging the "tainted" UnMa that is "tainted by reality" to be false in order to defend the "better" Wei Ma.

In 1997's "Unsealed House", the computer that Unma bought home to learn to access the Internet, or the old stupid Apple desktop running 3.5 magnetic films, but it has been able to perfectly virtualize a personality to transgress and obliterate real people. The saddest thing is not the pursuit and killing of the crazy fan Me-Mania, but the fact that Wei Ma himself has gradually been brainwashed by the web page controlled by Liu Mei, believing that there is really another self who still resists becoming an actor, there is really a self who went to buy clothes for the murder and was taken shopping photos, and even hallucinated to find the murderer's blood clothes in his wardrobe.

Fortunately, Imatoshi had good intentions and left some details to support the unma who was not willing to be denied. The blood-clad shopping bag in the hallucination and the shopping bag in the shopping photo on another web page (which should be an old photo taken by Liu Mei) have two dots of differences in the LOGO; the scene where Wei Ma "wakes up" from the dream many times in the movie, and the calendar on the wall also have subtle changes, which are the references left by the director to the onlookers to distinguish between virtual and real. However, outside of the movie, we, like Me-Mania and Liu Mei, are somewhat wishful thinking about denying the existence of such a reference object.

In 1997's "Unma's House", In the play -- "Double Bondage", Wei Ma repeated the line "Who are you?" "Have we asked another self on the phone or computer screen today? Or with the completion of the virtual world and the rapid development of technological means, we have willingly given up this problem?

Imatoshi eventually defeats Rumi's attempt to obliterate her illusion, saying, "I'm really Unma." This is not the position that Imatoshi decided to take in the face of his own sensitive anxieties about the future, compared to the determination of director Oshii Mori in his contemporary masterpiece "Ghost in the Shell" to embrace the virtual world and carry out a realistic revolution with the virtual world, which of the two is more optimistic or more pessimistic? Perhaps only katsuyo Otomo's realistic attitude in the middle is more meaningful. But in any case, our first step must be to get out of the "unhemped house" first.

Liao Weitang